We need a nationwide teach-in on the First Amendment

The Hamptons is a very upscale region in New York state where the very wealthy live. Apparently residents who are supporters of Donald Trump are having to keep their allegiance a secret because their neighbors hate him.

President Trump’s Hamptons supporters have gone underground.
…

“We are all in the closet,” said a boutique owner in Southampton who fears reprisals from his customers — most of them moneyed Democrats — if he speaks openly about his allegiance to Trump. “It’s like you have this disease and people want to run away from you.”

A builder based in Westhampton worried that his customers would boycott his services if he reveals his support of the president. “People have really strong opinions here and if you go around wearing a MAGA hat, you really need to fear physical violence,” he said, adding the anti-Trump aggression comes mostly from summer residents.
…

“They’re all Democrats, so for us it’s a matter of survival,” said an art consultant who works in Sag Harbor. “We live in the land of the First Amendment, but if you want to stay in business out here, you have to keep your opinions to yourself. We are hitting a very dark and strange place as a country.”

What will it take people to realize that the First Amendment only guarantees that the government “shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech”? In other words, the government cannot censor your speech (except under very limited conditions) and you are free to say that you adore Trump and to wear as many MAGA hats as you like, if that floats your boat. The First Amendment does not require other people to like you or approve of what you say or not criticize you or support your business.

Man dies in taco eating contest

Last month I posted about the weird practice of food-eating competitions and said that it can’t be good for people to force-feed themselves to excess.

Well, the worst has happened. A man has died while taking part in a taco-eating contest.

Dana Hutchings, 41, of Fresno, died Tuesday night shortly after arriving at a hospital, said Tony Botti, a Fresno sheriff spokesman.

An autopsy on Hutchings will be done Thursday to determine a cause of death, Botti said. It was not immediately known how many tacos the man had eaten or whether he had won the contest.
…

Matthew Boylan, who watched Tuesday’s taco eating contest from his seat in the stadium, told the Fresno Bee he quickly noticed Hutchings because “he was eating so fast compared to the other two [contestants]”.

“It was like he’d never eaten before,” Boylan said. “He was just shoving the tacos down his mouth without chewing.”

He said Hutchings collapsed and hit his face on a table about seven minutes into the contest, then fell to the ground. The eating contest ended immediately.

This is not a ‘sport’ that should be encouraged.

How white nationalism went mainstream

Luke Darby has a good analysis of how white supremacy has gone mainstream in the US and led to the rise of mass murders by believers.

All of these shooters were obsessed with the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, sometimes referred to as “white genocide”. It’s the idea that shadowy elites – usually Jewish, almost always liberal – are orchestrating the destruction of white culture through demographic change. The theory goes that white culture will be eroded mainly through migration and birthrates: more people of color are arriving in majority white counties, the ones already there are having more and more babies, and birthrates are declining for the soon-to-be-oppressed white people.
[Read more…]

The weird obsession of Ohio State University

Anyone who lives in Ohio will immediately recognize the solecism I committed in the title of this blog post. The university insists that it be referred to as The Ohio State University and woe unto anyone who merely calls it Ohio State University. Why this obsession I don’t know. Perhaps it has something to do with wanting to be seen as unique is some way. All I know is that it causes endless amusement and trolling by people who deliberately drop the ‘the’ like I did above. It is not unusual for people to sarcastically place heavy emphasis on the word ‘the’.

But Cory Doctorow says that the university has turned that obsession up to 11 by filing a trademark application for the word ‘THE”. You can read more about it here.

Good luck with that.

What Jeffrey Epstein’s death reveals about the shocking state of US jails

While there have been all manner of speculations about how Jeffrey Epstein may have met his death in jail, lawyer Ken White, who has been a federal prosecutor, says that those who think that “jailers could not possibly be so incompetent, cruel, or indifferent as to let such a high-profile prisoner commit suicide” do not realize that the truth may be less sensational but more disturbing, that this kind of death in US prisons is far more common than people think and is due to a culture of neglect, lack of staff, poor training, abuse, and sheer cruelty on the part of those who run these institutions.
[Read more…]

The phony binary choice of conspiracy versus journalistic independence

I mentioned in an earlier post how the media propaganda system works to tilt coverage in favor of candidates who will favor the interests of the oligarchy and against those who attack them. I used as an example the case of the New York Times reporter who was assigned to cover Bernie Sanders.

Now, the editor of the Washington Post Marty Baron has responded to the accusation by Bernie Sanders that this newspaper, owned by Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, may tend to be biased against politicians like him because he has lambasted the greed of the wealthy and their exploitation of workers and called for tax increases on them to fund programs that serve the less well-to-do.
[Read more…]

This is the bridge too far for evangelicals?

Many evangelicals have been perfectly willing to overlook all of Donald Trump’s appalling acts but apparently there is one thing that he did recently that has seriously rankled some of them. What could possibly be worse than all those other things, you ask? It was something Trump said at the recent rally in North Carolina where his supporters made the infamous ‘send her back’ chant about congresswoman Ilhan Omar while Trump smugly smiled
[Read more…]

Bernie has always been Bernie

One of the things that happens to candidates who seek high national office like the presidency is that their past comes under the microscope and it often happens that they have said things and supported policies that are at odds with what they say they stand for now and what the voters want. This can lead to them having to give explanations that the impression of the past is misleading or, if that is not plausible, to give apologies and say they have learned from their mistakes.
[Read more…]

What next for the Epstein investigation?

The death of Jeffrey Epstein in jail has caused a great deal of anger among his many victims who were hoping that his trial would serve to bring justice. They now fear that the whole investigation may shut down. If it does, there will be huge sighs of relief among all Epstein’s friends and associates. But the prosecutors in the case say that the investigations will continue. The vast scale of the sex trafficking of minors means that there had to have been other people involved. One of the charges against Epstein was a conspiracy charge and that means that other people’s roles were also being investigated.
[Read more…]